


brutality, burial ( a tableau )

by seraf



Category: The Magnus Archives (Podcast)
Genre: ( canon typical ), (mike), Buried Alive, Canon Compliant, Canon-Typical Violence, Character Study, Experimental Style, Gen, Graphic Description, Gunshot Wounds, Introspection, Jewish Character, Just to be safe, Missing Scene, Police Brutality, The Hunt Fear Entity (The Magnus Archives), Vomiting, mag091
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-02-22
Updated: 2021-02-22
Packaged: 2021-03-19 06:20:05
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,474
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/29621901
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/seraf/pseuds/seraf
Summary: ( a scene. four people with dirt under their nails. one - a man crouched on the ground, fingers blistered, unaccustomed to the hard work of digging graves. he is wiping his mouth clean with the sleeve of a borrowed shirt, the meager contents of his stomach spilled across the unforgiving earth. the second - a woman who will not look at him. who will not look at the body. she is frozen in motion, tossing a spadeful of dirt over the face of a man she did not just see try to blink. she is technically human in a way the other three in this clearing are not, but it is a technicality that means less and less with every spadeful of soil. third - a second woman. though we cannot see her tongue in her mouth, it has run over the points of canines that refuse to dull until the taste of blood sings in the cracks between her teeth. her gun is still cooling in its holster, and she drives the spade into the earth viciously. fourth, and last - there is the body. which is and is not a body at all. which the earth piling over him is delighted to know as less dead than the other three think. )
Relationships: Basira Hussain & Alice "Daisy" Tonner, Basira Hussain & Jonathan "Jon" Sims | The Archivist & Alice "Daisy" Tonner, Jonathan "Jon" Sims | The Archivist & Alice "Daisy" Tonner, Michael "Mike" Crew & Jonathan "Jon" Sims | The Archivist, The Hunt & Alice "Daisy" Tonner
Comments: 7
Kudos: 40





	brutality, burial ( a tableau )

**Author's Note:**

> just some experiments w character study and writing style. heed the trigger warnings.

**( a scene. four people with dirt under their nails. one - a man crouched on the ground, fingers blistered, unaccustomed to the hard work of digging graves. he is wiping his mouth clean with the sleeve of a borrowed shirt, the meager contents of his stomach spilled across the unforgiving earth. the second - a woman who will not look at him. who will not look at the body. she is frozen in motion, tossing a spadeful of dirt over the face of a man she did not just see try to blink. she is technically human in a way the other three in this clearing are not, but it is a technicality that means less and less with every spadeful of soil. third - a second woman. though we cannot see her tongue in her mouth, it has run over the points of canines that refuse to dull until the taste of blood sings in the cracks between her teeth. her gun is still cooling in its holster, and she drives the spade into the earth viciously. fourth, and last - there is the body. which is and is not a body at all. which the earth piling over him is delighted to know as less dead than the other three think. )**

_one_.

daisy only had two spades.

it makes sense, of course. in a warped way, it makes sense. he doesn’t know whether she kept the second as a just-in-case measure, in case the first broke - hardly the kind of thing you want to stop halfway through - or if she kept it in case she ever had a partner for this final and most defining part of her work. and in a way, she does, now. their motions are almost synchronous, like cogs of a machine. the shifting muscles of daisy’s back, the sound of basira’s spade digging into the soil, the sound of dirt covering the body of michael crew from daisy’s own efforts a millisecond after. like the beat of a drum, the beat of a heart, the beat on forest ground of many pack hunters closing in on wounded prey.

only two spades, but daisy had given him one of them. dragged him up to his feet and thrust it into his hands and told him to dig, flash of teeth splitting the pale skin of her face in a smilesnarl when he cried out at the way he could feel the blistered skin of his burned hand tearing at the force she pushed it at him with. and basira had just watched. jon had dug and dug and bled and felt sweat pouring down his back under the shirt he borrowed from georgie that must be ruined now, with the dirt and bits of mike crew’s brain on it ( _g-d don’t think about that don’t think about the way you’d still been holding up his limp body when she shot him through the head, don’t think about the smell of gunpowder in the air_ ) and cried, unable to stop himself with the way his exhausted arms wanted him to fall apart, with the way his lungs burned worse than they had at terminal velocity, making it even harder to breathe, choking him with every motion of the spade as though _he_ were the one being buried.

he’d collapsed in a hole half-dug, and for a moment had been terrified that they’d leave him there. that daisy would just keep throwing the dirt in over him, and this is where he would die, surrounded by the hidden bones of those she had judged unworthy. maybe she would have.

but that had been when basira finally stopped watching, something cracking open in her eyes and pulling jon out of the half-dug shallow grave, taking the spade from his hands, which both sang their blistered agony to the cooling dusk air. he doesn’t quite remember the transition from her pulling him up to where he crouches now, trying to wipe bile from his chapped lips with the sleeve of georgie’s shirt, not able to care about the dirt that smears into his cheek.

there is something liquid that he does not want to think about slowly oozing into the bandages around his burned hand. he doesn’t want to look to see if the telltale stains of red are coming through or if it’s something else. he feels profusely _unclean,_ feeling something that might be blood or pus spread underneath the bandages into the remnants of the worm holes that jude had almost melted shut in places. he wonders if he’ll be able to use this hand again. he wonders how he’ll clean the dirt from it, when even the idea of pulling back the gauze makes his stomach lurch.

every part of him aches. his eyes dart between the two women, as though _watching_ could ever keep him safe. dusk threatens the sky above.

_two_.

she didn’t take the spade from sims as an act of mercy.

she can rationalize it to herself like that, though. maybe. or she can just say that it’s inefficient to have him be one of the two people digging at this point - his scrawny academic arms were trembling under the weight of each half-spadeful of dirt as he continued to keep working. they’d be here till midnight if he kept at it, and the road out here is bad enough that she doesn’t want to have to deal with trying to come back in the pitch dark. maybe she could tell herself she just didn’t like standing around. inactivity wasn’t for her.

but none of those would be the truth. or . . . none of them would be the _whole_ truth.

she took the spade from him because when daisy kicked the slight body of michael crew into the shallow grave, all steel-toed boots and brutal practicality, she saw it flinch.

jon didn’t see it. he had been hunched over in the shallow grave, trying to catch his breath. she had pulled him out and taken the spade into her own hands before her mind caught up to her mechanical motions. it just felt like animal instinct. it’s easier, to think about it on those terms. jon is a cornered animal at the end of his rope. if he gets pushed any further, he’s going to shut down entirely, and probably do something stupid.

is that it, though?

daisy. she trusts daisy’s judgement. had heard her call the thin body an _it._ i’ve killed one monster today.

a man with a bullet through his head can’t open and shut his mouth like a fish out of water, as though desperately trying to get enough air to breathe. ergo, what they are burying is not a man.

the next three spadefuls of dirt she spills into the shallow grave, she tips purposefully over the man’s face, drowning him in soil. it’s an act of mercy to _someone,_ her bearing witness without telling her companions. she is doing the right thing. she is with daisy, and she stopped her from going too far, so this can’t be where the line is drawn. it isn’t too far, to take it from jon’s hands so he won’t notice the signs of something less than death. it isn’t too far to cover his face in earth so daisy won’t catch the scent of blood from whatever is left of his breath.

it is simply what needs to be done.

_three._

she can hear sims’ pulse in the air, preyfast and erratic, tripping over itself like an animal drunk with fear, and her own blood tastes heady in her mouth as she chews on the inside of her cheek, teeth unable to lose some of the predatory sharpness they had drawn upon in anticipation of a kill that had been taken from her so unceremoniously. her partner stands beside her, and something inside daisy’s ribcage sings in the same way that the sound of sims’ fear does, a glowing and crimson harmony.

when her spade finds earth, she stabs it in, a sharp lunge of a motion, as though she could draw the blood something inside her pants for out from the muddy english ground.

she finds herself hating the hollowbone creature they’re burying now, for not having put up more of a fight. for not having tried to run. if this is as much of a culmination as she is going to get, there is some part of her that wishes there had at _least_ been a chase. a part of herself snarls at the common sense that lingers in the rest of her, in her hands tightgripped around the spade, disappointed that they had shot it in the head. maybe she could have given it the chance to think it had slipped from out of her hands. sims had said something about _vertigo._ it wouldn’t be the first time she had chased something that the sky had filled. they were swift, when not caught off guard like this one had been.

( a churning disappointment in her gut at how easy it had been. a let down. the feeling of birdhollow bone crunching beneath her heavy boots, the way gravity settled back more comfortably into the flat when she had kicked its face bloody - _that_ had been satisfying. and hadn’t sims said that it had killed people before? was it really _justice,_ if it left this world this easily? if she didn’t instill in it fear enough that the sky in its blood turned to ice and it tries to make itself small before it finally dies? it had been moreish, that moment of shattered china and bone when it had opened the door for her. )

the pacing animal inside of her settles down, huntmuzzled and teeth still bared. the muscles in her neck twitch, wanting to glance over at sims again. there’s some part of herself that feels almost _consoled_ by the possibility that he might not be able to do it. that bouchard will simply smile that moneygreased smile of his, eyes that _infuriating_ grey, and daisy will be able to wring sims’ skinny little monster neck after she puts a bullet between those sullage colored _eyes_ his boss has. that she can make both of them stop _looking_ at her and basira both.

( she wants to spill sims’ blood for that, as well. for compromising basira, her partner basira, like this. for making her _look_ at daisy as well, with something between pity and disappointment in her eyes as their spades fill back in the hollow they’ve dug. _can’t you understand?_ she wants to ask her. wants to shake basira’s shoulders and see if that rattles some sense into her. wants to stop feeling the _caution_ that had been there for a moment, in basira’s gaze. )

( for now, she takes some comfort in a couple of things. the way sims’ shoulders still shudder and the sharp bilescent in the air, ripe with his fear. the way basira’s motions fall into easy rhythm with her own. she could be daisy’s partner in this, too, and the efficacious speed at which the shallow grave fills shows it. the consolation prize of a second hunt offered her, and the thought of ripping into bouchard’s smug look. )

_four._

he has never been easy to kill.

there is some stubborn part of him that dug its heels in at age eight and simply refused to die, and it seems to have stuck. his mother used to joke, when he was still in the hospital with agony tearing through his skin, that it ran in their blood. _we’ve always been hard to kill,_ she told him, thumb brushing over the place on his throat where the lightning had arced into his skin through the magen david that had been hanging there. _stay with us, michael. i’m proud of you._

it is not a mercy.

what he is right now couldn’t really be called _alive._ he is alive in the same way a live wire is. nothing but a conduit for electrical signals, every part of his body echoing _pain, pain, pain._ he tries to move, but it is hard to remember how to shift his fingers or how to fill his lungs with air when his hand is twisted all the wrong way and pinned under the weight of his side and his ribs dig shatterbone shards into every attempt to suck down air.

it’s hard, to try and think around a hole in your head. to try and focus when the prism of your thoughts is the sky, and that is taken from you with every spadeful of dirt tossed onto your body. his mouth tries to open, and all that pours in is soil, loose and iron-rich with the blood that was spilled on it earlier.

how had this happened? everything seems like disjointed pieces that refuse to click together into a coherent whole. he had given the archivist with his wide eyes mercy, and now - now there is nothing but soil and livewire pain. he remembers talking to jude, once, when he was still young enough the sky filled itself with phantom storms in his wake. _a home is just the best place for a person to hurt you,_ she had said, with her waxmelt grin and eyes that, ironically, lacked any warmth. _and it’s where you can be hurt the worst._

the stench of rotten foundations collapsing around him and disease wracking his body. the knowledge that if he tripped, he was dead, as he ran out of his flat, the fingers of the lichtenberg figure close enough to brush the hairs of the back of his neck. was it just arrogance, that he had thought he had been safe, here? was it just fate, that every home he had was just a trap to eventually spring?

he lets himself succumb to the pain. there is nothing else he can do.

it is the last time the earth they pack over him will let him have the release of unconsciousness.

**( fin. )**

**( coda - a receptionist, in the late hours her job asks of her, with the irregular schedules everyone keeps here. she has a dustpan, and her hands are _not_ shaking as she sweeps up the floor of her office. there is nothing here but the mud the three of them tracked in, clothing covered in it. she does not think about the stain of blood where jonathan sims had had to catch his balance on the edge of her desk when the tall woman dressed as a police officer shoved him forwards. she does not look at the tooth that had been dislodged from her boot when they had passed, voices raised, into bouchard’s office. she shivers at the breeze the open window lets in, but it takes the smell of blood out with it. )**


End file.
